Robert Rodriguez Explains How a 1995 Failure Led to Sin City and Spy Kids

Robert Rodriguez has had a career marked mostly by stunning success — starting with his very DIY, $7,000 feature El Mariachi becoming a massive hit. When he faced a rare failure a few years later, he turned the experience into two of his biggest successes: The Spy Kids franchise and Sin City.

Rodriguez is highly sought for indie filmmaking advice because of El Mariachi, a film he initially made in hopes of cracking the low-budget Mexican home video market. A former cartoonist at the University of Texas at Austin, who was best known at the time for the hit 1991 festival short "Bedhead," he earned the money to make El Mariachi by taking part in medical studies, and shot it extremely efficiently in the northern Mexican border town of Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila.

The film had launch the indie boom of the '90s, has been selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry, and was recognized by the Guinness World Records as the lowest-budgeted film ever to gross $1 million at the box office.

Also Read: 13 Movies About the World's Oldest Profession That Don't Sugarcoat Anything, Including Sin City

Rodriguez went on to make two sequels to El Mariachi, both starring Antonio Banderas, and met Quentin Tarantino on the festival circuit when both El Mariachi and Tarantino's 1992 Reservoir Dogs were drawing acclaim. The two directors would go on to collaborate on several films, including 1996's From Dusk till Dawn and 2007's Grindhouse, which featured a double feature of Rodriguez's Planet Terror and Tarantino's Death Proof.

But their first collaboration to make it to theaters was a bomb.

Robert Rodriguez on How Four Rooms Led to Sin City and Spy Kids

Rodriguez recently explained on The Joe Rogan Experience that Tarantino invited him to take part in Four Rooms with this pitch: "Hey, I'm going to make a movie called Four Rooms. Four different directors. You've got to use the bellhop. It's New Year's Eve. You're in a hotel. You can't leave your hotel room. You want to do it?"

Rodriguez said he immediately signed on, even though if he'd done more research he would have learned that anthologies rarely succeed at the box office. He cited the financial failure of 1989's New York Stories, which bombed despite featuring shorts by Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. (New York Stories also, notably, features the film debuts of Kirsten Dunst and eventual two-time Best Actor Oscar winner Adrien Brody.)

Four Rooms came out in 1995, and 30 years later remains an intriguing mid-90s curiosity thanks to the fascinating assemblage of talent: Tarantino and Rodriguez each direct a segment, as do Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell. The cast includes Tim Roth, one of the stars of Tarantino's 1994 Pulp Fiction, as the bellhop, as well as Madonna, Jennifer Beals. Paul Calderon, Ione Skye, Marissa Tomei, and more.

Like New York Stories, it failed to catch on in theaters. But, Rodriguez told Rogan, two interesting things came from it.

First: His segment of Four Rooms featured a couple played by Banderas and Tamlyn Tomita who tip the bellhop to look after their children. When he saw the stars dressed up in formal wear for the film, Rodriguez thought to himself, "Wow, they look like a really cool international spy couple. What if they were spies? And the two little kids who can barely tie their shoes don't know it? And they get captured and the kids have to go save them?"

The idea evolved into Spy Kids, which became a $550 million franchise.

Second: Rodriguez decided to try again with the anthology concept — but this time with "not four stories — three stories" and "not four directors, but the same director." The result was his mesmerizing 2005 Sin City, based on the graphic novels by Frank Miller. The film was another hit, earning about $160 million, and spawned a sequel, 2014's Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, which failed to match the success of the original.

So two franchises emerged from Four Rooms.

"Sin City and Spy Kids directly came from that thing you would call a failure, if you focused on the failure," Rodriguez told Rogan.

The lesson, Rodriguez explained, is to "go back and look at something that you had a real instinct for, that you did and it didn't work, and sift through the ashes of it. And you're going to find either that you've already had the success from it and you didn't realize it... or you will find something that will be the key to your success."

Main image: Jessica Alba as Nancy and Nick Stahl as Ethan Roark Jr, in Sin City, directed by Robert Rodriguez. Miramax Films.

Editor's note: Corrects spelling of Rogan.